Freelance Confidential - Amanda Hackwith [9]
Travis King, of Green Tea Design, agrees and underlines the role of a freelancer as a business owner:
My biggest advice to new freelancers is to work on running a business as much as you do on honing your skills. Being a successful freelancer works hand-in-hand with being a successful business person. If you're constantly asking "Where are the clients?", then you haven't been running things as a business. Marketing, billing, budgeting, client service, etc. are just as important to learn as how to make a lens flare in Photoshop.
Successful freelancers will learn to account for the "maintenance" time of running a business. Unsuccessful freelancers will try to cut corners with the business portion of the work—ignoring your finances, only looking for clients once your work has run out. Forgetting to treat your freelance work as an actual business is the quickest way to bury it. Keep meticulous records, stay on top of your invoices, and never, ever stop selling yourself to new clients.
Reality #3: Being a freelancer is being in the business of selling yourself.
All your skill, industry knowledge, and creativity will not mean a thing if you run out of clients willing to pay for your services. It is easy to find one great client or defining project and fall into the trap of complacency. Lea Woodward, freelance business coach, summed it up handily:
Now I know that marketing is one of the most vital activities any freelancer should be doing on an ongoing basis. Never. Stop. Marketing.
However, it's not enough to simply build an efficient website and pay for advertising to direct people there. In fact, what we think of as traditional marketing is often ineffective for the time and resources invested in it. That leads us to Reality #4.
Reality #4: The best kind of "marketing" is activity and quality work.
As we discussed in the Big Questions chapter, overwhelmingly, you will find the majority of your work from referrals and word of mouth. The two runners-up to direct referrals are clients gained from the strength of your portfolio and from interactions on social networking services like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and others. That means that outside of referrals the two biggest sources for enticing clients is doing impressive work and being active and visible.
People are social creatures; we want to trust people we interact with. The more opportunities you give yourself to interact with your clients and engage them in conversation, the more they will want to trust your credibility in your profession. Back up this trust with solid content and visible achievements and your name will be the first on the list when a need arises.
In the next chapter we'll delve into what makes for effective marketing via your portfolio and social media and how you can best reach out to and impress your clients.
Reality #5: Diversity is the best kind of security.
Securing a stable source of income is a priority for most self-employed professionals, especially if you have family or dependents relying on you making money that month. In recent years, however, full-time work can be just as big a risk. Lea Woodward feels freelancing can be even more secure:
With my husband's career background of being faced with redundancy three times within two years, going it alone seemed infinitely less risky to us! We decided that taking control of our own destiny was the only way to safeguard our financial fortunes so that's what we did.
Unanimously, our experts cited diversity as the best way to ensure success and security as a freelancer. If you have multiple streams of income and a stable of various clients, you're in a much more secure position to adjust when a single project gets cancelled or a client flakes on you. For more tips on diversifying your entire business, see Chapter 6.
Reality #6: Freelancing can be a springboard to other opportunities.
As in any career, sometimes what you start out doing (or intending to do) is not what you end up being successful and well known for. The best freelancers will continue to